New font technologies such as variable fonts and OpenType-SVG are being added to the font standards. These technologies extend a font's capabilities in valuable ways such as interpolatable axes for typographic styles such as weight and width or enabling the expression of multiple colors or gradients with a glyph. Foundries are creating fonts utilizing these new technologies. In addition, mobile and desktop applications are adding support for these new technologies.
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts and is one of the most popular font specifications. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. Because of wide availability and typographic flexibility, including provisions for handling the diverse behaviors of all the world's writing systems, OpenType fonts are used commonly today on major computer platforms.
OpenType comes in two flavors, TrueType (.ttf file extension) and OpenTypeCFF (.otf file extension). Font formats such as OpenType specify how a font file such as Arial.ttf (“True Type Format”) or Helvetica.otf (“OpenType Font Format”) should appear on a device as well as the format of the bits and tables within that file. Ideally, the same font file on any operating system should behave identically because the operating system (“OS”) should know how to read the file format.
In the last several years, two new ways of specifying glyph outlines have been added to the OpenType standard. One addition was SVG (“Scalable Vector Graphics”) glyphs, which allow for a glyph in an OpenType font to include multiple colors. In addition, a technology referred to as variable fonts allows a user to edit fonts to define a desired weight or width. In other words, variable fonts allow the interpolation of aspects of fonts such as the font characters' weight (for example, exactly how bold or light it looks). Previously, a font could only be presented in fixed variation such as bold or italics.
Modern font management and licensing models, which are typically cloud-based, may be predicated on a downloaded licensed font being stored in a secret location on disk not visible to the casual user. In this scenario, users may employ a font sync technology that allows them to download and synchronize desired fonts from a cloud based server. These licensing models typically require fonts to be activated via an operating system application programming interface (OS API) call on the client to enable an application that enumerates OS fonts to “see” or gain access to the selected or desired font. Such an OS API activation call will fail if the OS doesn't yet support the new font technology.
Therefore, a significant and unresolved problem is how to start deploying new font technologies across heterogeneous operating systems that may or may not support a particular font technology.